Education

The Confusion between Liberal (Arts) Education and Liberalism

One of the problems confronting us today is the lack of an appropriate idiom for discussing education in our times. Even our new age ‘liberal arts’ institutions that have come up all over India today do not give their students a sense of what it means to be educated in this way. One of the reasons for this is, perhaps, that our discussions on liberal (arts) education are suffused with the views of liberalism; sometimes it is even assumed that the two are interchangeable.

The changes in the higher education in the last century, especially in the humanities and social sciences, can be cited as evidence of liberalism restructuring the university and the educational thought, thus reinforcing the confusion. Even in the writings of an eminent, educational philosopher like Martha Nussbaum we can observe this mix-up. In her book, Cultivating Humanity, she defines liberal arts education as ‘liberal’ in the sense that it ‘liberates the mind from the bondage of habit and custom.’ Also, by arguing that liberal arts education, particularly the humanities and the arts, cultivate critical thinking by concerning themselves with the lives of others from different class, race, gender, nationality and culture and producing the ‘world-citizen’ ideal for a democratic order, she collapses the knowledge endeavour of humanities with the liberal, political agenda of equality and social justice. The liberal’s discomfort with tradition can be seen here when liberal education is pitted against customs and habits, and in the understanding of the idea of critical thinking as the questioning of one’s tradition.

Given this widely prevalent confusion, it is imperative that we draw attention to the distinction between ‘liberalism’ and ‘liberal arts education’ so that we regain the idiom through which we can talk and think about education.

Liberal Arts Education vs Liberalism

To begin with, while liberal arts education is an educational idea, liberalism is a political idea. The former is far older and can be traced back to the artes liberales (liberal arts) of ancient classical traditions of Greek and Rome, which referred to knowledge pursuits worthy of those with leisure. ‘Liberalism’, on the other hand, is more recent and can be traced back to the epoch of ‘Enlightenment’, and perhaps began with the thoughts of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke of the seventeenth century. It is meant to indicate the preferred form of political governance based on the premise that human beings are by nature free and equal, and therefore the governance needs to accord primacy to the liberty of the individual. Any constraint to this liberty needs to be justified and arrived at through consent.

Thus, despite sharing the word “liberal”, the ethos, the habits of mind and the attitudes emphasized by ‘liberal education’ and ‘liberalism’ differ. The ‘liberal’ in liberalism emphasizes the rights and freedom of the individual over the claims by community, tradition, and the state. Further, the contrast in this case is ‘the conservative’ who questions the premise that the individual has to be accorded priority. He argues instead that logically the community is prior to the individual since one is always born into a society, and therefore one must value the role of community and tradition in one’s formation. On the other hand, the ‘liberal’ in liberal arts education is a reference to the nature of the ‘arts’ to be cultivated, both the pre-conditions and results of cultivating them. For, liberal arts like philosophy, mathematics, poetry, music, sciences are meant to be pursued for their own intrinsic worth and not for any practical ends that they serve. Hence, these arts of understanding can only be pursued by ‘free’ human beings, those with leisure and ‘free’ from the burden of “the necessary.” Thus, the contrast for ‘liberal’ in liberal arts is not the conservative as it is in liberalism but the necessary arts like trade, agriculture, industry which serve utility and are necessary for one’s profession, livelihood and subsistence.

‘Liberal’ in liberal arts also refers to the result of such a pursuit; one realizes a certain sort of freedom by pursuing knowledge for its own sake. One emerges a freer person by learning to think for oneself. In the 18th century, with industrialization, the idea of the modern university emphasized the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake in pursuit of a life of sciences vis-à-vis the pursuit of technical/vocational and professional skills. This contrast was a reformulation of the ancient Greek ideal though in the Greek ideal, liberal arts too were envisaged as initiation into a set of skills. These differing contrasts should tell us that the idiom of discussing liberal education and liberalism are not the same. Yet, we often tend to confuse the two.

Liberal Arts Education and the Idea of Good Life

While evoking the traditional distinction of liberal arts versus necessary arts/professional skills (sometimes articulated as knowledge versus skills) might have made sense during the industrial times when several technical/professional institutions came up to address industrial demands, today many such institutions too have developed a reflective component to their practice. Hence, today it makes sense to see liberal arts as not about the intrinsic nature of the knowledge domain being investigated but as referring to an exploratory approach, an ability or know-how that can be brought to any domain/s. For, skills/know-how or practical knowledge is the base for all traditions of learning, including the practical and the theoretical – whether in cooking, music, agriculture, business or the sciences – though there may be varying degrees of complexity involved.

Hence, instead of understanding liberal arts education in opposition to professional skills and goals (as is the case of traditional contrasts), we can see the latter as subordinated to a larger end. We can imagine them to be concentric circles, the larger encompassing the smaller. In such a scheme, we can understand liberal arts education to be not just an education into a practice for a profession but as referring to something more. What is this something more? We can refer to this ‘something more’ as a engagement not only with the practice one is a part of but also with the question of how to live well or lead a good life.

What might we mean by the idea of good life here? In this context, it might be useful to make a distinction between a good life one desires versus a good life worthy of desire, a distinction that Narahari Rao, a philosopher, often makes. The good life we desire often includes sufficient wealth, good health, proper, clean surroundings and other requirements (including the political conditions seen as valuable by liberalism) which create the condition for the pursuit of a good life worthy of desire. However, the latter is not an individual’s subjective notion but comprises the life ideals that permeate the society within which a human being is formed and which are available to one as sentiments for further exploration and discovery.

How do we facilitate such an inquiry into the notion of good life worthy of desire? We do it by cultivating the art of understanding, by initiating one into one’s cultural inheritance and cultivating taste and judgement in the various fields. In Oakeshott’s terms, education then is not just about acquiring information about a certain body of knowledge (though information is used) but learning an intellectual know-how or what he calls judgement, a more tacit part of knowledge which cannot be formulated as explicit rules, propositions or as information (or what he sees as embedded in the practice of an art without which the rules of the art would be unintelligible).

Hence, the idea of the classics is central to the idea of liberal arts education for the significant works are meant to cultivate our arts of understanding and hone our judgement. Engaging with them enables a reflective reconstruction of the conceptual vocabulary in every generation, thereby making possible self-understanding and participation in a genuine conversation with tradition. It is by being initiated into the collective achievement and endeavours of our civilization/s, that we also cultivate our judgement.

This model of education, as is evident, runs against the usually held biological model of education which understands education as the “unfolding” of innate human potentiality or of human essence or of actualizing one’s self and identity. For in this model, one needs to acknowledge the importance of cultures/civilizations/community in our formation. Every human being is an heir to a rich civilizational inheritance of human achievement into which one is born. However, this inheritance is not like inheriting land or money where one succeeds to it automatically. It requires constant effort and cultivation on our part. As Oakeshott points out, “this world can be entered, possessed and enjoyed only in a process of learning.” And education is the process through which one is initiated into this path of cultivation, with each generation initiating the next.

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